Spoiler alert – this blog contains discussion of storylines throughout season three of Game of Thrones. If you have read the books, please do not spoiler future plotlines in the comments.

To paraphrase the famous HBO slogan, there's television and then there's Game of Thrones. No other show is so adept at marrying the epic to the personal, showing you how the smallest of actions can have consequences on the grandest of scales. And all without seeming to work up a sweat.

Television is littered with the corpses of shows that stumbled in their third season and few if any of them faced the logistical problems of Game of Thrones, which juggles a growing cast with increasingly complicated plotlines and numerous far-flung locations. Yet despite these issues, season three was the strongest yet.

This is largely because when David Benioff and DB Weiss agreed to adapt A Song of Ice and Fire it was always with this season in mind. A Storm of Swords is the most tightly written and propulsive of Martin's books, building to climax after climax, while putting every character through the emotional and physical wringer. It features some of the most memorable moments in Martin's series; scenes that book fans have imagined for years, so to say that Benioff and Weiss were under pressure is an understatement. Luckily, that seems to have spurred them on. The more confident Benioff and Weiss grow with the material, the more the show becomes bigger than an adaptation, standing alone as a work of art in its own right: brilliant, bawdy and occasionally capable of stopping the breath in your throat.

Thus we learnt that tarnished golden boy Jaime Lannister uses sarcasm as a shield, that the astute Margaery is playing a long game, and that there are still some characters in this brutal world who will act to help their family (thank you Yara Greyjoy for giving us a brief spark of humanity in all the misery and despair). Amid the darkness there were also some nice comic moments. Many of them were provided by Diana Rigg, who was clearly having a ball as the sharp-tongued Queen of Thorns, relishing her combative scenes with Peter Dinklage's Tyrion, Conleth Hill's Varys and Aidan Gillan's Littlefinger.

Ultimately though, every moment, both dark and light, was building slowly but inexorably towards the most terrible, most talked-about moment in A Storm of Swords, Edmure Tully's Red Wedding to Roslin Frey. When the wedding day finally arrived it was a showcase for all that is good about this take on Martin's world: a perfect mix of sharp writing, social unease and slow-building dread anchored by a devastating performance by Michelle Fairley as Catelyn Stark.

What raises Game of Thrones above the competition is its sense of a wider vision at play. This is drama as one long dance in which partners are swapped, allegiances are formed and the desire for power seeps into every crack in the kingdom. Throughout it all, one constant remains: trust no one for no one trusts you. That, and always keep a couple of dragons nearby, of course.